Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted's office announced last week that his ongoing investigation into voter fraud has identified 27 people who are not citizens and who voted in Ohio elections. An earlier report by Husted’s office found that 17 “non-citizens” had cast ballots, adding up to a total of 44 illegally cast ballots since 2012.

Ohio Secretary Jon Husted’s office announced last week that his ongoing investigation into voter fraud has identified 27 people who are not citizens, but voted in Ohio elections. An earlier report by Husted’s office found that 17 “non-citizens” had cast ballots, adding up to a total of 44 illegally cast ballots since 2012.

Given these numbers, a mere 0.000006 percent of the 7.7 million registered voters in Ohio cast illegal ballots. Despite the miniscule numbers, Husted hailed the efforts as a success.

“No amount of voter fraud is acceptable and as the state’s chief elections officer it is my responsibility to maintain our voter rolls and ensure only those who are eligible are participating in our elections,” Husted said in a statement.

In 2013, Husted forwarded 17 cases of what appeared to be non-citizen voting during the 2012 presidential election to the Ohio attorney general, resulting in four convictions. Many more voting irregularities were reported by elections officials during the general election, but prosecutors across the state toldCleveland.com that the majority were the result of voter confusion or mistakes by officials.

“Basically, I found that there wasn’t an overwhelming pattern of voter fraud,” Butler County Prosecutor Michael T. Gmoser told the local news outlet. “There’s a couple of isolated incidents of people making bone-headed decisions.”

Husted has admitted as much, saying on Thursday that voter fraud is rare. Still, Husted said he will continue to investigate those voting illegally and called on the federal government to aid him in the process.

Husted, in a February letter to President Obama, said he is worried that the president’s executive action on immigration will increase the number of people voting illegally in the state.

“As chief elections official in a key swing state, I take very seriously my responsibility to make it both easy to vote and hard to cheat by ensuring that only eligible voters may participate in federal, state, and local elections,” he said in a statement about the letter, arguing that the executive action will expand a “loophole” allowing undocumented immigrants to vote.

Some Ohio lawmakers have pointed out that not only has Husted focused on the nonexistent issue of “non-citizen” voter fraud, he also has not taken steps to make voting easier.

“I would like to see the Secretary of State focus on the real problem in our elections instead of playing to his base with these distractions,” Democratic state Rep. Kathleen Clyde said in a statement. “Ohioans deserve answers on why their votes are being thrown out,” she said, in reference to the 10,000 absentee ballots rejected during the 2014 election.

Ohio is one of many states that have painted voter fraud as a rampant threat to elections, using the issue to push legislation that makes casting ballots harder for many Americans who are legally registered to vote, particularly Black Americans.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/03/16/ohios-voter-fraud-investigation-finds-almost-nothing/feed/124Passing the DREAM Act Would Acknowledge the Human Rights of Migrant Children and Benefit All of Ushttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/11/12/passing-dream-act-would-benefit-society-and-acknowledge-human-rights-migrant-chil/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=passing-dream-act-would-benefit-society-and-acknowledge-human-rights-migrant-chil
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/11/12/passing-dream-act-would-benefit-society-and-acknowledge-human-rights-migrant-chil/#commentsMon, 12 Nov 2012 09:13:25 +0000While the Maryland ballot initiative on education is great for young migrants in that state, it highlights the fact that federal action is sorely needed to protect the human rights and dignity of migrants everywhere.

]]>November 6th was a good day for human rights, at least in Maryland. Not only did the state’s voters support same-sex marriage, they also voted in favor of expanding access to higher education for all of Maryland’s students, regardless of their immigration status.

While the Maryland ballot initiative on education is great for young migrants in that state, it highlights the fact that federal action is sorely needed to protect the human rights and dignity of migrants everywhere.

There is some good news. In June this year, President Obama signed an executive order preventing the Department of Homeland Security from deporting undocumented immigrants under 30 who came to the United States before they were 16 years old, and who fulfill a number of other criteria regarding their moral standing and education.

However, while this change rightly was hailed as a positive development for hundreds of thousands of young people, it does not overcome the need for legislative action—President Obama himself called it a “stop-gap” measure. In fact, it is now more than decade since a bipartisan initiative proposing similar benefits first was introduced in the Senate under the title “Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act.”

The idea behind the original bill—and the various versions of it introduced over the years—was to open the possibility for higher education and ultimately citizenship for noncitizen children of good moral character, regardless of their immigration status.

And the idea is solid. The individuals potentially covered by these bills are already a positive part of their communities, and many know no other home than the United States. They are, for all intents and purposes, Americans in everything but paperwork. Moreover, maintaining the documentary limbo many of them are in does nothing but make it more difficult for them to pay tax, improve their education, or otherwise contribute constructively to society. In other words: refusing to regularize the status of undocumented children risks turning them into the pariahs they never were.

However, since the first DREAM Act was introduced in 2001, and despite the passage of a version of the bill in the House of Representatives in 2010, no final legislation has been approved by both houses. Arguments that the bill would foster illegal immigration or potentially shield gang members do not bear out in reality. For starters, the bill explicitly seeks to exclude those with a criminal background and applies equally to documented and undocumented aliens. Also, from a pragmatic perspective, most people migrate because they can’t provide for their families at home, not because they think they can “pull one over” on their host country. The lack of DREAM Act-like legislation does not make foreign-born children magically disappear or “self-deport.” Rather, it prevents them from fulfilling their potential as participants in society, thus becoming more of a burden than they otherwise would have been: a lose-lose situation if ever there was one.

But even more importantly, education is a human right. Numerous international human rights bodies have repeatedly clarified that states must protect the human rights of those living in their territory, regardless of their legal status. Certainly, states can and must independently determine their immigration and access policies, but they cannot decide whether any one individual has rights: we all do.

Up until this week, 11 states had already adopted their own versions of the DREAM Act, including California, Texas, and New York, all states with large and rapidly growing foreign-born populations. It is telling that states with large immigrant populations know that providing immigrant children with access to higher education only can be beneficial to everyone.

The ballot initiative approved in Maryland this week sends a powerful message to Congress that states are willing to provide, piecemeal, what the federal government should be providing, wholesale. It also underlines the uneven nature of legal protections for immigrants until federal law is passed, especially because immigration generally remains under federal purview. Hopefully, passing a federal DREAM Act is a priority item on the agenda of the new Congress.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/11/12/passing-dream-act-would-benefit-society-and-acknowledge-human-rights-migrant-chil/feed/0How Our Immigration Policies Hurt Families–and All of Ushttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/05/06/immigration-policies-curb-formation-families/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=immigration-policies-curb-formation-families
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/05/06/immigration-policies-curb-formation-families/#commentsFri, 06 May 2011 07:12:13 +0000As immigration debates have increasingly cast immigrant women as “unfit” and “undesirable”, the reproductive rights and ability for immigrant women to make healthy decisions for themselves and their families has been increasingly undermined.

This article is one in a series on immigrant rights and attacks against immigrants being published by RH Reality Check in partnership with the National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights. See all articles in this series here.

On March 24th, the Associated Press broke a story about the discovery of a maternity ward for women from China being operated in the San Gabriel Valley in California. The AP article described the upscale, luxury townhomes, part of a quiet residential condo development, that had been converted into a maternity ward for middle- and upper-income Chinese women to deliver American-born children in the hopes that U.S. citizenship would provide greater opportunities for their children within China. However, subsequent articles painted a different, more nefarious picture about a seedy Chinese American man being fined for running an illegal business[1] (rather than for building code violations for removing some interior walls to create separate living quarters for the women), converted kitchens crammed with bassinets, pamphlets and baby formula, and neighbors complaining of the scent of “cheap canola oil” in the air.[2]

This story has had additional leverage in helping anti-immigrant advocates assert a new “baby boom” among “millions” of “birth tourists” who come to the US in order to have themselves an American baby.[3] Although the statistics indicate that less than one percent of all births in the US are to foreigners visiting on tourist visas, that didn’t stop Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) from making claims of a long-term plot by pregnant foreign women to hatch “terror babies” so that “one day, 20, 30 years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.”[4]

Really? As absurd as this sounds, this leap from reality is being used to justify harsh anti-immigrant policies that have had devastating and dangerous impacts on the lives of immigrant mothers and their children. As immigration debates have increasingly cast immigrant women as “unfit” and “undesirable,” reproductive rights and the ability of immigrant women to make healthy decisions for themselves and their families has been increasingly undermined. Attacks on the 14th Amendment and efforts to strip the right to citizenship from American-born children of immigrant mothers are just the most glaring examples of efforts to restrict the reproductive rights of immigrant women and control the growth of non-White families.

Let’s be clear. U.S. Immigration policy was launched on efforts to curb the formation of immigrant families. The very first immigration law ever created was based on fears that Chinese immigrants, people who were so “alien” to Anglo-Saxons that they were “ineligible for citizenship,” might start families. As a result, Chinese women were recast as “unfit,” “undesirable” and criminal. The Page Act of 1875 recast Chinese women as prostitutes in order to justify prohibiting them from immigrating to the US.[5] The reality is that this, and other immigration policies, are steeped in conflicting push-pull desires to control the demographics of the US population while attracting a skilled and unskilled labor force.

The current rapid demographic shifts have only increased the fear and hysteria about the immigrants among us. The “maternity tourist” story heightens the historic perspective of Asian and Pacific Islander women as perpetual foreigners who continue to breed ever more children to challenge U.S. dominance academically, economically, and increasingly, on the world political stage. Meanwhile, Latina women living in the United States, those “illegal alien invaders,” are the breeders of an ever-growing wave of brown babies that will change the very face of America. As a result, immigrant mothers are being caught in the quagmire of unjust immigration policies that weaken our economy, threaten the safety of our communities, and undermine American values.

The National Coalition of Immigrant Women’s Rights (NCIWR), a coalition of more than 40 reproductive justice organizations and ally organizations that oppose these attempts to restrict the reproductive freedom and decision-making of immigrant women. We believe that like all women in our society, immigrant women deserve equality, dignity, and human rights and that strong families are the foundation of successful communities.

Last month NCIWR reached out to other movement leaders to host a roundtable discussionthat looked at the wide range of immigrant policy and the impacts on families and communities.

Among the core issues are forced separation of parents from their American-born children, wholesale detention and deportation of the breadwinners and heads of household of immigrant families, and increasing fear of law enforcement. All of these serve to weaken our communities.

Join NCIWR to oppose these policies and start helping now! You can take action by sharing your story, joining the NCIWR campaign, and pushing back against efforts to dehumanize immigrant women.

Immigrant mothers are the backbone of our society. Immigrant women come to this country to work, to escape poverty, to join family already here. Immigrant mothers make monumental, daily sacrifices to build a better future for themselves and their children. Punishing them, out of fear that the economic, social, and political contributions and innovations that they and their children will make in this country, serves only to hurt us all. We must focus on the American values of family, openness, equality, and opportunity for all. The vast majority of us are the result of America’s rich immigrant tradition, let us honor the immigrant mothers of our past and present by focusing on immigration policies that move this great country forward, not backward.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/05/06/immigration-policies-curb-formation-families/feed/0The Campaign of Stigma and Intimidation Against Immigrant Womenhttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/05/04/campaign-stigma-intimidation-against-immigrant-women/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=campaign-stigma-intimidation-against-immigrant-women
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/05/04/campaign-stigma-intimidation-against-immigrant-women/#commentsWed, 04 May 2011 22:47:05 +0000Attacks on immigrants are an issue not only for the immigrant rights community; these attacks take aim at the core principles of the groups working to advance human and civil rights, equal opportunity, human rights and dignity, healthcare for all, and more.

This article is one in a series on immigrant rights and attacks against immigrants being published by RH Reality Check in partnership with the National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights. See all articles in the series here.

During Women’s History Month 2011 leaders from the environmental justice, immigration, women and labor movements convened a Roundtable in Washington DC to deliver a critical message: the attacks on the citizenship and basic human rights of immigrants and their children is a pressing feminist issue in our country. The 14th Amendment is one of the greatest civil rights achievements of our time, and efforts to unravel these human rights profoundly impacts diverse social movements.

The National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights (NCIWR) strongly condemns the ongoing campaign of intimidation and stigma aimed at immigrant women and their families. Instead of unveiling proposals to address the critical issues that currently affect our country, like jobs, the economy, education, the federal deficit, solving our foreign relations issues, some vocal conservatives have decided to wage a new war of discrimination against immigrant women.

Despite the growing national concern about these attacks, many state lawmakers continue to make progress in pushing harmful proposals, including states such as Florida, Georgia and Tennessee. These bills attempt to radically redefine citizenship, create new civil rights violations such as allowing police officers to demand proof of citizenship from those they deem “suspicious”.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Critics of immigrants have launched a full-scale advocacy campaign of fear and resentment about immigrant women and their families. Misconstruing basic facts about immigration and using phrases like “lawless destructive anarchy of invasion,” “anchor babies,” and illegal alien invader,” anti-family, anti-immigrant lawmakers are advancing a smear campaign against immigrant women which impacts all families working to make ends meet and communities of color.

Like all women in our society, immigrant women deserve equality, dignity, and human rights. Women immigrants have been derided in these public debates, with few voices standing up for their right to reproductive health care, safety, food and housing, and access to social safety nets for their children. We must all work to elevate immigrant women’s voices and push back against dehumanizing rhetoric and attacks on immigrant women and their families.

NCIWR is the only national collaboration to specifically focus on women and gender issues in the public discourse on immigration. We work to elevate women’s voices and push back against dehumanizing attacks. The coalition represents more than 60 leading organizations with a presence nationally and in nearly every state. We also work with our civil rights allies to support their work to engage in these critical constitutional debates.

Lawmakers must not be allowed to attack women and their children using baseless academic theories of the Constitution. These “immigration” attacks are not only an issue for the immigrant rights community; these attacks take aim at the principles of the groups representing the diverse range of human and civil rights, including those fighting for equal opportunity, human rights and dignity, healthcare for all, and more. The National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights welcomes organizations to join our coalition as we continue this fight to stop the promotion of stigma and bias against women and their children.